I am posting below the letter that came today from the Authors Guild regarding Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads. It is hard, as an author, not to get really riled about this issue. The publication and distribution and even the *reviewing* of books is becoming increasingly centralized and Big-Brotherish, and dictating far too much of what gets read and what gets ignored.
Writers dream of reaching readers who understand their work. It doesn’t happen by bludgeoning people, or hoodwinking them into buying your book. Nor does it happen by making writers into hucksters shamelessly promoting their wares, or beggars groveling for readership (or often, both at once). The effort to make blockbuster books on the part of the big conglomerates (in this case read ‘Amazon’) seems so wrong-headed, so based on the notion that everyone wants to read the same book, or the same few books. Just as writers’ interests vary widely, so do readers’ interests, and that is how it should be. Who wants to homogenize writing? Who wants to have everyone reading the same 20-30 books each year, holding the same-old, same-old conversations over the water cooler? Isn’t it enough that we do that with TV shows? Does it have to be the same with books? A more cynical way of thinking of this is that Amazon doesn’t much care who reads their books, only that the books are bought.
As you can see I am exercised about this issue, in no small part because I am one of the ‘midlist’ writers who is getting increasingly squeezed by these mergers and monopolies. But in truth, it hurts us all.
The letter begins here:
Feel free to forward or comment. Here it is at our blog: http://tinyurl.com/cs8obt7
Amazon’s garden walls are about to grow much higher. In a truly devastating act of vertical integration, Amazon is buying Goodreads, its only sizable competitor for reader reviews and a site known for the depth and breadth of its users’ book recommendations. Recommendations from like-minded readers appear to be the Holy Grail of online book marketing. By combining Goodreads’ recommendation database with Amazon’s own vast databases of readers’ purchase histories, Amazon’s control of online bookselling approaches the insurmountable.
“Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads is a textbook example of how modern Internet monopolies can be built,” said Scott Turow, Authors Guild president. “The key is to eliminate or absorb competitors before they pose a serious threat. With its 16 million subscribers, Goodreads could easily have become a competing on-line bookseller, or played a role in directing buyers to a site other than Amazon. Instead, Amazon has scuttled that potential and also squelched what was fast becoming the go-to venue for on-line reviews, attracting far more attention than Amazon for those seeking independent assessment and discussion of books. As those in advertising have long known, the key to driving sales is controlling information.”
One example should make it clear how formidable this combination is. For “Animals Make Us Human” by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Amazon has 123 customer reviews, and B&N has about 40 (they report 150, but that figure includes ratings as well as reviews). Goodreads swamps these figures, with 469 reviews and 2,266 ratings for the book.
As an independent platform, Goodreads, with its 16 million members, posed a serious competitive threat to Amazon. No more.
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